Kenneth Knepper: The windy, long road to map-making

Tuesday

I never believed my son had a future as a cartographer until he showed me a series of squiggly lines, which managed to depict perfectly a recent trip we made to Arkansas.

I never believed my son had a future as a cartographer until he showed me a series of squiggly lines, which managed to depict perfectly a recent trip we made to Arkansas.

Even though the “map” was the product of drawing football plays that would never be used in a spread offense and he fully intended to place the piece of paper in the “round file,” the random lines seemingly going nowhere captured the exact route my GPS had calculated as the shortest distance.

We were on our way to see my father-in-law, who moved to Arkansas a little more than a year ago so he could retire and play golf, fish and refurbish old cars.

I suppose I should state at this point I once lived in Arkansas, as a boy.

Back then we lived among a series of roads that, from the air, must have looked similar to what backlash looks like on a fishing reel.

Of course, I didn’t see much, if any, Arkansas roads as a youth, because I was always too busy trying to sleep, for fear my weak stomach would render me violently ill from motion sickness as my dad negotiated each hairpin curve at mach speeds.

I remember one particular road in northwest Arkansas, which became a routine stopping point on my family’s journeys — a place where I would stand next to the car, heaving violently as my dad sat inside, probably wishing he had re-thought the whole child thing with my mom.

Lucky for me, however, our family dog was equally motion sick along the twisting, turning roads and often joined me for a regurgitation session.

Once, while setting on my lap as a 6-week-old puppy, the side to side, up and down motion made him poop in my hand, too. The memory is seared into my brain, just like the following moments that included being inside a women’s restroom, because it happened to be the nearest door to the car at the filling station where my dad stopped, after he erupted in laughter a few miles prior.

To an impressionable third-grade boy who loved his pet more than anything, it was still difficult not leaving the dog at the gas station, right next to the place where I threw up.

I was reminded of those memories as I followed a friendly female voice on the GPS, advising me to turn right in one mile.

From there, we embarked on a journey that eventually landed us on a secondary dirt road, far from civilization … unless you counted the herd of cattle standing along a fence looking at us as something not seen very often.

Every few yards, we were instructed to turn — I’m quite sure on at least seven occasions, we saw an entire section of ground from at least three sides.

As best I could figure, my father-in-law’s house was 4.25 miles from the interstate highway we ventured from, but about 62 miles by way of the access roads that eventually connected to his street.

While I’m no highway engineer, I’m pretty sure I could effectively save the state several million dollars in road maintenance fees by simply straightening out a few curves here and there.

It also might alleviate a few unpleasant moments for travelers who have to see other people standing on the shoulder of the road, looking like the head spinning scene from the movie “The Exorcist.”

When we finally arrived, I had that familiar feeling of dryness in my mouth and spent the first few minutes standing in driveway, under the lame pretense of familiarizing myself with his neighborhood.

Really, I just didn’t want the rest of my family to possibly see me in a weak moment — one that might forever scar their memories of seeing my father-in-law.

But, after regaining some composure, I decided to hang on to my son’s football play mistake.

Sometime, we’ll need to get out of there and it will be nice to have something to look at when I’m standing on the shoulder of the road about one mile from my father-in-law’s house … or 26 miles, if you’re following the road system.

Ken Knepper is publisher of The Newton Kansan and The McPherson Sentinel. He can be contacted at kenneth.knepper@thekansan.com.

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